Simple fix for Mac OS X 10.6.3 Samba Write Access problem

Upgrading to Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3 was a painless procedure until I tried to access some SMB mounts… suddenly I had no write access to my samba drives! I was presented with this error message:

The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items.

Thankfully there’s a workaround of sorts and it is pretty straightforward.

Fixing the Samba/SMB write access problem in 10.6.3:
* Open smb.conf on the samba server in your favorite text editorsudo nano /etc/smb.conf
* Find the global samba settings section under [global] and add the following line:unix extensions = no
* Save and close smb.conf (in nano, Control-O followed by the return key to save, then Control-X to exit)
* Restart the smb server

The cause of the SMB error in Mac OS X 10.6.3:
After digging around I found the cause on SplatDot, and I can confirm I had the same error messages pertaining to wide links and unix extensions enabled at the same time, two parameters which are incompatible. This is why the fix works, you are disabling unix extensions (of course, you could disable wide links but there is a performance hit to that method) and the error will no longer occur.

I imagine this is just a bug in the way that Mac OS X 10.6.3 handles SMB shares and it will probably be fixed relatively quickly by Apple, and when it is fixed you can and should reactivate unix extensions again on the Samba server. Doing so is just a matter of removing the unix extensions = no line from the smb.conf file.

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